Miraculous Marvel

It was the spring of 2002, and I was sitting in a dark movie theater with my brother and grandparents watching Sam Raimi’s feature film adaptation of Stan Lee’s “Spider-Man.”

For 121 glorious minutes, I watched Tobey Maguire spinning webs and swinging around New York City, saving Mary Jane Watson and defeating the Green Goblin.

Now, I was never a comic book reader. My early morning cartoon choices were more “Pokémon” and “The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” instead of “Batman” or “Superman.” But seeing Spidey on the big screen profoundly changed me.

I will never be able to go back and locate the exact moment I fell in love with the power of film, but I have to believe “Spider-Man” was a major contributing factor. This may seem like a rather inconsequential and common thing for a young boy growing up in the Midwest, but as a kid who geared toward playing with Disney dolls as opposed to G.I. Joes, superheroes were never supposed to be my thing.

But in all great stories, you learn to expect the unexpected.

“Spider-Man” opened me up to a whole array of superhero films I would have otherwise never given another thought about. It led me to discover “X-Men ” and multiple Marvel Comics-based films that followed in the wake of the success of “Spider-Man,” like “X2: X-Men United,” “Spider-Man 2” and eventually 2008’s game changer, “Iron Man,” which launched the current Marvel/Disney mega-franchise we have today.

Modern superheroes face their fair share of justified criticism. They’re almost always white, predominantly male and exclusively heterosexual on the big screen. These are issues I hope we will find satisfying solutions to in the coming years.

But for now, I’ll keep peace with the Marvel universe because what they’re building is monumental, and they have the power and responsibility to make these needed changes to the superhero genre.

As Marvel and Disney work together to tie the worlds of Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and other superheroes into one continuous movie universe, we should be standing in shock and awe.

The talent and collaboration to pull off something this exciting and groundbreaking is almost too much to pack into our tiny brains.

Imagine the directors, writers, producers and actors committed across all these Marvel projects. In just the next two years we will see new Thor, Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man and Avengers films released through the joint efforts of Marvel Comics and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

As a new crop of young superhero fans grow up in this new Marvel heyday, I can only hope they find the same wonder in these films as I did as a kid.

Superheroes are here to remind us that the impossible is possible, that everyday people are capable of huge changes and that good does triumph over evil.

It’s a hard message to sell in such cynical times, but someone’s got to put on the cape and try.